Making A Major Mental Shift

A Quantum Lifestyle Leap Saved This Rockstar - And It Can Save You, Too

“This is about exponential change,” said Ken Resnicow, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. He explained that the typical models of behavior change are linear and rational, but there is nothing rational about how an epiphany changes people. Instead, it’s a very emotional process. And it’s not step-by-step, but is rather described as taking a quantum leap. You transport one end of the spectrum to the other in an instant without having to travel all the intervening steps.

That’s what happened for Phil.

“I was disgusted with myself that I was so weak and had such a lack of control with drinking,” Phil told me. “It wasn’t fun anymore. It used to be a blast, but it just stopped being fun. It was very black or white. I knew I had to go this way or that way.”

Professor Resnicow described Phil’s alcohol-quitting epiphany as the ground shifting under someone’s feet. “The typical epiphanies are: ‘Oh, shit! I don’t want to be this person,’” he said. He also described them as sometimes being religiously motivated, where one believes that God doesn’t want them to be that person any longer.

Phil didn’t want to be a man who drank any longer, and so motivation to quit came built in. There was no white-knuckle struggle. “I never had any doubt about it once I decided to quit,” Phil said. But that doesn’t mean it was always a smooth process.

“For the first two weeks I felt insecure and mostly bored because it had become such a part of my life to go down to the pub,” Phil told me. “It was like a ritual. It was the major pastime of my life to go and get fucked up. Again, that really irritated me to learn this about myself. I was disgusted with myself because of it.”

Then he found he had all this extra time on his hands, and that’s when the fitness transformation started. Instead of drinking (and being hungover), Phil became an exercise fanatic. But the benefits didn’t end there.

“Other things started opening up,” Phil said. “I started to notice culture and architecture. My playing got better. There was more focus. I started feeling really good, like I’d been taking some kind of performance enhancing drug because I was off alcohol. Parts of my brain were turning on for the first time in a long time. The parts of my body were being reactivated as well. It was really interesting.”

If you are struggling, whether it’s with addiction, poor eating habits, lack of exercise, or something else, it really is possible to change everything in a moment. But how?

“That really is the $64,000 question,” said professor Resnicow. We don’t actually know why these kind of life-changing epiphanies happen. William Miller thinks they can’t be generated, but rather epiphany either happens or it doesn’t. Resnicow is a little more optimistic, suggesting that chaos theory can be manipulated.

Chaos theory, if it’s been a while since you saw the original Jurassic Park scene explaining it, is when small changes in original conditions can lead to much bigger changes further down the line. It has also been referred to as the butterfly effect. According to Resnicow, one way to increase the likelihood of having such a life-changing epiphany is to stop doing the same things all the time. Keep experimenting with new and different “initial conditions” that introduce some chaos into your life. It increases the possibility that some new bit of input or data can cause the various bits of information in your brain to suddenly coalesce in a profound way. Then, boom! You suddenly know what you have to do, and there is no going back.

Resnicow also stressed not stressing. If the actual epiphany is meant to happen, it will. And it can happen going through the regular, more linear and rational step-by-step process of changing one’s behavior. And just because you’ve had your life-changing moment doesn’t mean the work stops there. In fact, it means the real work has just begun.

“Everything is a work in progress,” said Phil.

James S. Fell is a syndicated fitness columnist for the Chicago Tribune and author of Lose It Right: A Brutally Honest 3-Stage Program to Help You Get Fit and Lose Weight Without Losing Your Mind, published by Random House Canada. Visit his site at www.BodyForWife.com for a free weight loss report. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.